Hello Leaders,
First off, let me quickly introduce myself. My name is Brian, and as Tim mentioned in the October State of the Nations, I have joined the Big Huge Games team as the Executive Producer for DomiNations. In my first post to the community, I would like to provide an update regarding the sandbagging issue and some of the changes that are coming up in the next week.
Let me start off by apologizing for the silence on our end. Part of why there’s been no news is that we wanted to be careful when making changes to World Wars and Glory. Specifically, we had to address the issue while ensuring that we don’t punish Alliances that legitimately want to bring players of various Ages. Instead, we wanted to target only those Alliances that are attempting to exploit the system by sandbagging. To meet that goal, we’ve been iterating a lot on the new design and running simulations to validate that the changes will work as intended.
In the next week, we will be rolling out a few changes to the way that Alliances gain and lose Glory. With this update, sandbagging Alliances gain less Glory in victory and lose more Glory in defeat. Legitimate Alliances are rewarded more for beating sandbagging Alliances and punished less for losing to them. Overall, legitimate Alliances will be gaining more Glory with each victory. This will make it very difficult for sandbagging Alliances to remain in prominent positions on the leaderboard.
We acknowledge that this may not be the only change that is required to disincentivize sandbagging Alliances. It’s a tricky problem, and we’ll continue to monitor its impact on the Glory leaderboard and the experience of World War. We consider this update the first step toward minimizing the effectiveness of this strategy without overly penalizing Alliances that bring players of various Ages to War.
We will make sure to announce when these changes are live so that you can test them out for yourself. We will also be welcoming your feedback on this change. Thanks to everyone in the community for continuing to highlight this very important issue!
Thank you,
BDS